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Verizon Tech Accused Of Making $220K In Sex Calls On User Lines
Joseph Vaccarelli, a former Verizon Technician, has been charged with racking up $220,000 in phone-sex calls by tapping into the land lines of nearly 950 customers. Authorities say that he made approximately 5,000 calls, resulting in 45,000 minutes of call time. Verizon estimated that out of a 40-week period, Vaccarelli spent 15 weeks talking on sex lines. How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?
You can have that much by either being very very good, or very very bad at it.
Yay, I have a sig.
uh.. Someone did notice. He got caught remember?
"Can you hear me now?"
"Good!"
"No, Bad! Very very bad... You have been so very bad!"
Set up 900 premium phone service. ...
Get mate at Verizon to use customers phones to call said service.
Profit.
But I think most slashdot users won't get it, because they're not used to being on top of things, if you know what I mean.
A few years ago I turned down a job offer as a Verizon Technician due to low pay - I didn't know there were these kinds of fringe benefits!
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
I'd tell ya, but then you'd die of exhaustion.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Did he own part of the phone-sex companies. That would explain that it was just a way to steal money and hide it. Less exciting story though.
So I guess 'idle' is /.'s way to try to emulate Fark now, huh.
9 minute average....better than your average geek. ;)
Notwithstanding that I think a great number of users here think idle is a waste of space, a headline like this ought to be taken seriously, not treated as if it were a joke. This guy compromised the accounts of nearly a thousand customers, and that is a HUGE breach for Verizon's customers.
.. This would explain why I've been getting those strange bills for 1-800-HORNY :D
Maybe both? :-P
is that the explanation would cut into valuable phone-sex time.
Now sue for ADA discrimination.... Because in a way, the company is responsible for his troubles, right?
I suggest you read Slashdot
I used to think a certain manager where I work had a bad stomach - he would often get up and say "back in 10 minutes". Evidently people in reception thought a certain secretary had a bad stomach too.
One day security installed a security camera in a stock room because they noticed that things "kept being moved around". Soon all became apparent.
All I can say is he may have lacked in duration but he made up in frequency!
He didnt compromise accounts, in the summary it says he tapped into land lines. That can be done with a $5 telephone handset and a pair of aligator clips, and was probably done using an actual linemans handset provided to him by the company. Google "beige box" for more info.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Joseph Vaccarelli, 45, of Nutley...[New York]
Presuming a 40 hr work week, that works out to be 1/3 of the year on phone sex lines.
That's pretty unbelievable, considering that one still needs time to jack into the lines in the first place.
I've done some slack things at work, and it's pretty easy to get distracted and find out you spent most of the day goofing off. But this would take a real concerted effort to not work.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
This is just more prof that Verizon techs do not work, while at well work.
Ok that's an old reference to how much a call used to cost. in getting snitched out to the cops.
Perhaps he was caught by deep packet inspection (or is it call Verizon's Market oriented wiretapping).
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I was ready to explode with laughter until I realized what it really said. Dammit.
-- A UVA student
...Slashdot was down. So he resorted to the next best thing!
I have been pretty tolerant of Idle, and thought that the Hate Mail stuff was mildly amusing (well, so long as I'm bored out of my brains). But, do we have to have this drivel on the front page? This idle CRAP gets more coverage (i.e. it's a fully 'expanded' headline) than many Programming or Games stories (which are often 'collapsed' abbreviated headlines). What is the purpose of diluting the front page of /. with these stupid stories? If I feel like a laugh I will go to The Onion. Thanks.
Now this is a good argument for an open office environment. Kind of hard having phone sex without the guy next to you eavesdropping, especially for 15 weeks :D
Okay, this is too easy to make fun of, but I do wonder why this took so long to figure out. Surely 900 numbers showing up on a bill would cause at least some of the customers to report the false charges and demand they be removed. Since these were all in the same region, the losses should have mounted quickly and the pattern detected. I realize we don't know the timing of these calls, but why did it take nine months? Or maybe given Verizon's chaotic internal accounting processes, I should simply be amazed Verizon figured it out at all.
Dear Slashdot,
It's nice to know there is someone who jacks off more than me.
Sincerely,
David Duchovny
Thanks.
[FUCK BETA]
Maybe he was in on the calls business. And he thought if those bills turn up the customers would be too embarressed to compain.
Imagine how many divorces that guy most have caused.
How would you explain such a bill to your significant other and how would they react?
He should have tapped in somewhere later in the system, so his calls wouldn't get charged to a customer. But hey, maybe he wanted to get caught.
Also I wish to complain about this sentence from the summary. This sentence should be taken outside and shot:
It's a bad idea to start spelling out your punctuation. As you can see in the above sentence, the author has ended up with the word "period' surrounded by commas. "Period" is supposed to end a sentence. And it is supposed to be written as "." not spelled out with letters. Spelling out "period" in the middle of a sentence, and surrounding it with commas, is madness exclamation mark. See question mark? It's stupid. Please don't spell out the word "period", use the popular abbreviation: .
How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?
Shouldn't this article be filed in the 'Ask Slashdot' section?
Technical wise. It is as simple as driving up to a cabinet, cracking open a pit or walking into an MDF/IDF room, finding a pair that has tone and dialing. If that one doesn't work, go to the next pair.
I used to make calls on customers lines all the time but never anything that would cause them to get billed (local calls for support, cable pair information, etc).
WTF? This is Slashdot, he's a Unix hacker. Of course he has a beard!
That averages out to: $4.8888888888888888888888888888889 per minute.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
This guy wasn't after 45,000 minutes of phone sex. Don't be surprised if soon a follow-up article appears explaining he actually operated some of those lines himself, or is in another way affiliated.
Did anybody think the pink phone was a dildo?
link to torrent plz?
He got caught after 40 weeks, or almost 10 months of it. During which he spent 15/40 = 37.5% of his time talking to sex lines.
So maybe the question "why didn't he get caught?" is technically wrong, it practically begs for the question, "why did it take them so long?"
I mean, seriously, is stuff like, "hur hur hur, I want to pull down your panties and stick it in your ass" something you'd normally hear around the office when people are talking on the phone? Well, I guess I've had worse tech support before, but never that explicit ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Fark is another website.
I put on my robe and my wizard hat... :)
How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?
And how in the world do you have (sic) twice as much blog reading or solitire playing time? Don't ask me but somehow the usual office drone manages to achieve that. The problem here is not stealing money from the customers or even the immoral consequences of having this so called phone sex (which should better be called phone masturbation as I'm sure anyone here knows that sex involves a direct contact of exactly two people, not one). The problem is more subtle, yet much more important. It is doing something that one shouldn't be doing during the work time - be it sending sms text messages, smoking cigarettes, talking, playing online poker, changing the screen saver's wallpaper or flirting with a slutty assistant who has no self respect. And as rewarding as exposing this pervert from the story and his immoral behaviour may be, we should ask ourselves how can we force people to work instead of wasting time that we pay for - by taxes, phone bills, buying gasoline etc. Is there any way the average Joe can be forced to understand that he should be doing what we pay him to do and that doing anything else is basically theft from the ethical point of view? This is the question that we need to address in this age where it isn't always obvious that someone is wasting his time. The times are changing and so should our understanding of moral obligations to paying customers.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Much like the malware that was doing the rounds when everybody used dial-up modems, where it dialled phone sex lines in small island countries thousands of miles away and racked up a massive phone bill for you (and big profits for the sex line owners [who also had the malware written])... he might have been doing that so that he could cream (poor choice of words here, but...) a large chunk of revenue from it.
He has no idea who is on the other end, it could be some fat hairy old man with a girly voice,,,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I mean, seriously, is stuff like, "hur hur hur, I want to pull down your panties and stick it in your ass" something you'd normally hear around the office when people are talking on the phone?"
Maybe if you were working for a gay phone sex company...
How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?
Easy, you work for Verizon.
You'd think with all those people in "the network" following him while he was doing this, he'd get stage fright or someone would have said "I can SEE you now!"
Based on the summary, I thought the submitter was asking for advice on how to get away with doing the same thing.
oh man.. all I can think of is the friction burns D:
Leaves you with a LOT of idle time on your hands
Wow. This guy mus have a really sad life to spend that much time doing that. I understand working at verizon is probably really boring but come on. Thats gotta be about 3/4 of his day every day on the line, the other quarter was probably spent tapping the line
:)
It wasn't me making those calls....well that's what I told her anyway.
ed duval the very last person
... masturbating at work and boy are my arms tired!
butt set ...
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Surely you've worked at a medium sized or larger company and seen a number of people that seem to do no job. It's like a psychosis or something, they all develop similar mechanisms to kind of cope and survive. I've even seen start-ups with people totems; just guys that contribute very little but make someone in management feel secure.
I currently work at a networking company, we're not going out of business but we're not rich. We have a dead beat we tried to fire, turns out since it's a larger public company he goes on "program." It's going to take 2 years to fire a do-nothing, short of him committing a crime at work or a massive RIF, he's going to get paid for 2 years and do maybe 2 months worth of work, probably $100k in salary and another $50k in taxes, insurance and benies, you're looking at $300-400k just wasted... Not to mention the morale costs and the losses in the market place because the team is that much less effective. And if I was a betting man, we'll be on the hook for some unemployment when he does finally get let go. The worst thing you can do is develop feelings and opinions about it because that just makes you angry or starts to give you an excuse to stop working so most people just ignore it. I'd wager that in some companies, maybe 30% of the work force is a drain rather than doing real work. A company like Verizon? It's a phone company, they've built a whole industry on top of the 10% actual workers, what might be more shocking is that they actually did catch the guy; someone probably had to "cut red tape" somewhere and actually go out of their way to pull it off.
He was probably funding his own business, maybe calling lines he owns.
who got in so much trouble because of this guy. "Mom, Dad, I didn't make those calls, I swear!!!"
Ok, he couldn't have been on the phone for 45k minutes, or he couldn't have been doing this for 15 out of 40 weeks. 15 * 7 = 105 days 105 * 24 = 2,520 hours 2,520 * 60 = 151,200 minutes So he was either spending 3 times more time on the phone then what is said, or he was only doing this for 5 out of 40 weeks which is ALOT more reasonable (and believable! I mean, 15 weeks is a lot of wacking!). I hate to nit-pick at the math, but I do.
The guys only follow the wireless people.
"Joseph Vaccarelli, 45, of Nutley, made approximately 5,000 calls..."
Nutley. He had to be from Nutley.
I didn't read TFA, but the summary implies that he did it during work time. So the day is 8 hours, not 24. Plugging that information into your formula yields 15 weeks.
I'm sure, like all monkeys, Verizon phone monkeys play with themselves all the time. You know, in between grooming each other and flinging poo.
There's probably no way to tell the difference between one acting natural and one having phone sex. Unless you can communicate with them somehow...
Game... blouses.
I wonder how many different companies/numbers he called and how many phone sex agents he spoke to ... if it were the same company or even just a hand-full, wouldn't someone have noticed? My gut tells me whom ever owns the phone sex companies was in on this. I mean, eventually the girls would've been like, "Oh it's that guy again." They probably would've know him by name and probably at some point someone would've asked the question, "Just how much does this guy spend with us?" At which point they would've realized that he was always calling from a different number. That would've made them at least negligent - and yes, if families were broken up over this, these companies should be liable for their suffering as well.
"Hello? Is someone already using this line?"
"Oh yeah, put your tongue right there."
"Where?"
"Who is this?"
You'd expect him to be interrupted at this more.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
it's pretty easy to get distracted and find out you spent most of the day goofing off
Uh wait, I'm posting here too...
you had me at #!
Comes from the same group of the guy in the tech dept that surfed the web all day, ebay'd, sudoku, or youtubed.
Equally useless and draining on resources as well as loss in perceived cost and real costs.
I dont see this to be any different.
This would have been +5 funny if it had been posted 30 minutes sooner.
Further proof that Slashdot jumped the shark.
Does bring to mind another point: I wonder if there is a such a thing as terminal tennis elbow. From TFB:
Verizon estimated that out of a 40-week period, Vaccarelli spent 15 weeks talking on sex lines.
Holy crap! He's gotta look like the guy from Idiocracy's masturbation network commercial by now. Too bad there isn't an Olympic sport that requires you to have one really strong arm. If Air Hockey ever becomes an Olympic sport I believe we have our gold medal locked down.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Most of the replies change depending on, if he is talking to a men or women on phone!!
And I'm not making a joke. A close relative of mine has worked for Verizon for 20 years and I'm amazed at the stories he tells about the union employees. Probably the laziest, immature, uneducated bunch of morons on the planet (besides the Bush Admin). Take a look at news archives what these scumbags do during strikes: vandalize buildings and equipment, sabotage critical data and phone lines, cut off 911 service, etc. They are petty beyond belief and go running to their supervisors and unions heads any time they have a gripe. God forbid you ask them to move something and it's "not in their job description." That's an immediate grievance. I'm actually surprised this guy got in trouble. Most of the time, the union will go to GREAT lengths to protect these guys, even when they cut those 911 lines or start fires at company locations.
I have to applaud the man for the massive balls it takes to do something like this. No doubt he was fired, but talk about going out in a blaze of glory.
Well done sir.
I seriously hope he also gets retroactive immunity for tapping phones. People would get much more incensed with a single, sexual deviant listening in on their phone calls than a massive conspiracy starting at the top position of our government, and they might actually start giving a crap about illegal wiretapping.
that's what the guy on the pole was doing all day! I was wondering what the rubbing was all about...
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He must have forearms like Popeye...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
He didn't have to be in the Central Office to do this - he could have been anywhere between the frames in the Central Office to a customer's house... He could have been up on a telephone pole, down in a manhole, sitting outside in front of a distribution frame panel, in the woods somewhere next to a small distribution pedestal...
All you need is a 7/8" socket wrench, and a butt set (or hack a phone w/some 'gator clips vis a vis Beige Box). This is precisely the reason why if the phone company claims that YOU made a call that they can't conclusively prove it. Phone lines are inherently unsecure - anywhere between the premises and the Central Office one can tap into a line, and make a call from that line. If they know the number, they can clip the line at that point (so your premises don't ring (ok, no dial tone either)) and then get someone to call them back so they can take the call there... From the phone company's switch, it looks like you're on the line talking, but you're not!
Even caller ID is bullshit - just tap into a line, and make the call from there - it looks like the calls is coming from 312-222-2222 but in reality, it's not the Chicago Tribune Classified Ad line, just some schmuck up on a pole somewhere...
All you need is to look like you know what you're doing and no one is going to bother you. Get a van, put some magnetic signs on it that say "ABC Telecommunications Contractors" - get a flashing light, a safety vest and hard hat... Add a safety cone if you really want to... Crack open the box, and have at it... You ever stop to actually ask anyone in those boxes if they're really supposed to be there? Yeah, I thought so - neither do the cops...
Next up: Read on lock picking - you might just have the phone disconnected and never leave your house!
Here's his pic from the presuctors office release.
http://www.bcpo.net/bcpo/blog/index.php
He looks the part.
nt
Ah, you are right, i assumed he was some sort of sexual robot
Perhaps the CWA worked this into the employee benefits during contract renewal.